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106
The main character of Bilibin’s cover, Tsar Dadon, was borrowed from yet another one of Pushkin’s texts, “Fairy Tale about the Golden Cockerel” (Skazka o zolotom petushke), which Bilibin was illustrating concurrently with his drawings for Bugbear.162 Satirically, Bilibin’s picture relied on the juxtaposition of the scrawny-looking, nose-picking Grand Duke Dadon Dadonovich, who is described in the caption to the image as a “valiant and mighty epic hero (bogatyr’)” and the imposing figure of his father, Tsar Dadon, as well as on the visual representation of the Grand Duke as a little boy. The former device hinted at the popular perception of Nicholas as a docile ruler when compared with his resolute parent – Tsar Alexander III. The latter trope was borrowed from the artists and writers of Artsybushev’s Spectator and Chukovsky’s Signal, who had invented it only a short time before. Already in an August 1905 issue of Spectator, in a popular caricature drawing of the Black Hundred 25 silhouettes. 4 (25 siluetov. 4), Chekhonin inaugurated his visual representation of Tsar Nicholas as an underdeveloped child seen gaping at the disproportionately enormous figure of Grand Duke Aleksei
162 In fact, as G. Golynets had correctly observed, Bilibin’s work on the cover for Bugbear informed not only his subsequent illustrations for Pushkin’s “Fairy Tale about the Golden Cockerel,” but equally so his later work on set designs for N. Rimsky-Korsakov’s operatic adaptation of Pushkin’s fairy tale. See Golynets 76. Although the texts of Pushkin’s fairy tale undoubtedly contributed to Bilibin’s artistic visualization of Tsar Dadon, another source, which could inform this drawing and help to establish the connection between Tsar Dadon, Dadon Dadonovich and Nicholas II in readers’ minds, was the famous Imperial costume ball at the Winter Palace in February of 1903. During the two days of the festivities, the Emperor and the Empress, as well as members of the Imperial family and personalities close to the court, wore stylized Russian costumes of both noble and peasant origin. Nicholas II, for instance, was clad in the costume of his 17th century predecessor Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich, while Empress Aleksandra Fedorovna wore the dress of Tsarina Mariia Ilinichna Miloslavskaia – the first wife of Aleksei Mikhailovich. (Fig. 26) See R. Gafifullin, and L. Goriacheva, eds., Kostiumirovannyi bal v Zimnem dvortse. Issledovaniia, dokumenty, materialy, 2 vols. (Moscow: Russkii antikvariat, 2003). This highly publicized event provided ripe material for caricatures of the Tsar produced in the West, such as the one published by Camara in the French satirical review L’Assiette au Beurre in September 1903, possibly also contributing to Bilibin’s depictions of Tsar Dadon and his son in his cartoon for Bugbear. (Fig. 27)

The principal subject of inquiry in this dissertation is the satirical press of the First Russian Revolution, 1905-1906. The politically polarized satirical journals of this period are looked at as representing a constituent part of what Jürgen Habermas termed "the liberal-bourgeois public sphere" -- a new socio-political environment created in Russia in the fall and winter of 1905 through a confluence of societal pressure, Tsar's edicts and government legislation.; With Habermas's emphasis on the role of the press in the evolution of bourgeois liberalism in mind, and, in particular, examining the publishing histories as well as the visual and textual content of several major Russian left and right-wing satirical journals, in this dissertation I seek to elucidate larger questions, such as how these politically diverse media forums worked to expand through image and word the boundaries of the new public space and what external conditions and intrinsic contradictions prevented them from achieving this objective.; Although the presence of the politically stratified satirical press revealed the healthy workings of the newly opened public sphere capable of accommodating such competing critical discourses, I argue that its stability and, indeed, legitimacy, were continuously challenged not only by the autocratic state but, paradoxically, by the satirical press itself. Closely modeling their discourses on radical monarchist dogma, the right-wing satirical journals hindered the advancement in Russia of the liberal-bourgeois public sphere by denying some of its key elements through their ridicule of bourgeois parliamentarism, constitutionalism and, in certain respects, the capitalist market.; At the same time, the overly critical and unbending oppositional stance occupied vis-à-vis the tsarist state by the liberal-bourgeois and revolutionary satirical journals, like that of the left-wing political opposition, outweighed other, potentially more constructive forms of satirical journalism. Characteristic of the left-wing press as a whole and of the select journals explored in this study, such a stance presented an earlier example of what Louise McReynolds gauged as the Russian intelligentsia and the post-1905 periodical press retreating to a position of "a moral high ground" precluding both from finding compromises with the regime, and, ultimately, failing to secure the achievements of Russia's incipient bourgeois liberalism.

106
The main character of Bilibin’s cover, Tsar Dadon, was borrowed from yet another one of Pushkin’s texts, “Fairy Tale about the Golden Cockerel” (Skazka o zolotom petushke), which Bilibin was illustrating concurrently with his drawings for Bugbear.162 Satirically, Bilibin’s picture relied on the juxtaposition of the scrawny-looking, nose-picking Grand Duke Dadon Dadonovich, who is described in the caption to the image as a “valiant and mighty epic hero (bogatyr’)” and the imposing figure of his father, Tsar Dadon, as well as on the visual representation of the Grand Duke as a little boy. The former device hinted at the popular perception of Nicholas as a docile ruler when compared with his resolute parent – Tsar Alexander III. The latter trope was borrowed from the artists and writers of Artsybushev’s Spectator and Chukovsky’s Signal, who had invented it only a short time before. Already in an August 1905 issue of Spectator, in a popular caricature drawing of the Black Hundred 25 silhouettes. 4 (25 siluetov. 4), Chekhonin inaugurated his visual representation of Tsar Nicholas as an underdeveloped child seen gaping at the disproportionately enormous figure of Grand Duke Aleksei
162 In fact, as G. Golynets had correctly observed, Bilibin’s work on the cover for Bugbear informed not only his subsequent illustrations for Pushkin’s “Fairy Tale about the Golden Cockerel,” but equally so his later work on set designs for N. Rimsky-Korsakov’s operatic adaptation of Pushkin’s fairy tale. See Golynets 76. Although the texts of Pushkin’s fairy tale undoubtedly contributed to Bilibin’s artistic visualization of Tsar Dadon, another source, which could inform this drawing and help to establish the connection between Tsar Dadon, Dadon Dadonovich and Nicholas II in readers’ minds, was the famous Imperial costume ball at the Winter Palace in February of 1903. During the two days of the festivities, the Emperor and the Empress, as well as members of the Imperial family and personalities close to the court, wore stylized Russian costumes of both noble and peasant origin. Nicholas II, for instance, was clad in the costume of his 17th century predecessor Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich, while Empress Aleksandra Fedorovna wore the dress of Tsarina Mariia Ilinichna Miloslavskaia – the first wife of Aleksei Mikhailovich. (Fig. 26) See R. Gafifullin, and L. Goriacheva, eds., Kostiumirovannyi bal v Zimnem dvortse. Issledovaniia, dokumenty, materialy, 2 vols. (Moscow: Russkii antikvariat, 2003). This highly publicized event provided ripe material for caricatures of the Tsar produced in the West, such as the one published by Camara in the French satirical review L’Assiette au Beurre in September 1903, possibly also contributing to Bilibin’s depictions of Tsar Dadon and his son in his cartoon for Bugbear. (Fig. 27)